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One of my dearest friends in the world grew up in Maryland eating whole blue crabs she smashed with wooden mallets every summer. But after college, she decided to stay in Wisconsin. She doesn’t get to go home much, so when I told her I was writing a story about a company that overnights Maryland crabs across the country and that they were sending me crab cakes and whole spiced crabs and shrimp and even some crab meat bisque, she was, well, angry.

In contrast, I grew up in the vast swath of strip malls that is suburban Los Angeles, a town where In-N-Out burger is loved with such religious devotion that my hyper-healthy father quietly concealed its existence from me until I was in middle school.

When I interviewed him, Cameron Manesh, a second-generation Maryland fishmonger and the CEO of Cameron’s Seafood, brought this up without even knowing where I’m from: “If you’re on the West Coast, you know what In-N-Out is. You’ve been there, you know the animal style burger is great. But when you’re from Maryland or Virginia, that’s what Cameron’s Seafood is to these people.” I don't know if Cameron's can claim the name recognition of In-N-Out, but it's clear his family business has plenty of loyal customers.

Since his father and uncle set up shop in 1985, Cameron’s Seafood has grown to encompass fourteen retail locations and several food trucks. For thirty-three years, it’s been known as a trusted name in the world of Maryland crab. Cameron’s has the, “largest network to not only catch, but pick and distribute [Maryland blue crabs] along the East Coast. We’re all the way up to New York and we’re in Pennsylvania and Maryland. So we took a product that is almost impossible to copy, we built a very sophisticated network, and we started growing it.”

But over the past year that growth has caused their business to triple, and it’s all because they started getting into mail-order.

Maryland crabs inspire such devotion because of the frigid East Coast winters. They build up extra fat stores to get through it and it makes them absolutely addictive. One day in 2017, Manesh was talking to a customer and found out that he had driven from West Virginia just to get to get some of their Chesapeake Bay crabs: “They would drive up for three hours, bring a cooler with ice in it just to get the real Maryland crabs. In my industry it’s kind of like designer bags and knockoffs. There are so many knockoffs. People will buy a crab, even a blue crab, and they’ll cook it with Old Bay and call it Maryland-style and try to get the premium...These folks were paying much higher prices for the fake product...So we looked at each other and thought, why don’t we just get a cooler and ship it to them?”

Cameron Manesh, CEO of Cameron's Seafood

Cameron's Seafood

Since then, they’ve developed a subscription model that’s popular with Baby Boomers and have found an amazing amount of business from “displaced Marylanders” around the country. Cameron’s ships its products overnight so the crabs are almost exactly the same as they’d be right out of the water when they get to your door. They taste like a summer breeze, sweet and nautical and barely even there. The company is devoted to keeping that standard high; it will be working closely with a Maryland environmental organization to help protect the Chesapeake in January, and is working on increasing the sustainability of its packaging.

Maryland crabs are special. Like Vidalia onions and San Francisco sourdough, they don't taste the same anywhere else. Due to a Trumpian labor policy affecting seasonal workers, crabs are in short supply this year, but Manesh chose not to increase prices, focusing on his customers as his business expanded. That said, they’re still not cheap. But if you still need a last minute Christmas gift for a seafood lover in your life, there’s no substitute for the real thing.

I'm a nerd of the highest order. When you get me talking about something I love, I can go on for hours. My favorite topics are food, stories (don't get me started on…

I'm a nerd of the highest order. When you get me talking about something I love, I can go on for hours. My favorite topics are food, stories (don't get me started on fantasy novels), the world wide web, and how art both edible and indelible shows us that we're way more similar than we are different. I have a Master's in Food Studies from NYU, a Bachelor's in English from Beloit College, and I'm a Culinary Institute of America dropout. I'm fascinated by everything about food, so my Forbes blog touches everything from food YouTubers to restaurant tech startups to the changing culture of the professional kitchen.